“And once one understands that suffering is the best thing that one can hope to encounter in life, one thinks without terror, and almost as of a deliverance, of death.” –Proust, In Search Of Lost Time

There are few sights that remind me of the toughest challenge of my life more than the view of glaciated peaks along a mountain range. Last weekend I set out with Sweeney, my girlfriend, for an exciting day trip of trail-work near Mount Rainier. We were hoping to build up enough trust with the WTA trail work organization that they would consider us for the much more rugged extended backpacking trips this summer. Those trips include overnight camping and advanced trail work in remote wilderness areas. Sweeney, who is studying to be an environmental engineer, is enthusiastic about any opportunity to be part of a crew and potentially gain leadership experience. She is not just enthusiastic, but also ambitious, and for this weekend’s project she has chosen the particularly daunting task of constructing a stone staircase across a boulder field.

Since we don’t live very close to the work site and went out the night before, we met the group early Saturday morning after a less-than-satisfactory night’s sleep. We made the acquaintance of our group members and project leader, a middle aged man named Doug who is a black belt in Aikido, and then quickly set off down the trail. We all made small talk as we hiked under a pleasantly overcast grey sky. My thoughts wandered as I devoted some of my attention to the chatter around me. I thought about how different the forests look in Washington compared to the east coast, how nice it was not to have the sun beating down on me, and how cute Sweeney looked in her hard hat, like a professional engineer. Then, as we gained altitude, I saw Mount Raineer looming in the distance and at once my thoughts shifted entirely.

I was brought back instantly to that hostile, alien landscape. The white veil of sleet and snow over everything, and the white hot glare of the sun. A part of me died up there on that glacier, in the southernmost reaches of Patagonia. I’m not referring to the tissue of my fingers and toes that has never quite recovered from the ordeal. I thrust myself willingly to the razor’s edge of human endurance to test my limits, and a part of me must have died up there because I did not return the same. I look up from my daydreams just in time to catch Doug’s monotonous safety briefing. My mind drifted back to the leader of my National Outdoor Leadership School mountaineering program, who I confidently trusted with my life on that expedition. They call him KG. James Kagambi. A native of Kenya, he was one of the greatest mountaineers I have had the pleasure of meeting. He used to tell us that because of how he was raised in Kenya, his feet could fit into any sized boot. I saw his feet one time, and his toes were curled inwards and slightly deformed, possibly from wearing shoes that didn’t fit when he was growing up. He used to boast that he didn’t need to treat his water, because his body has its own filtration system. Years later, while travelling abroad I met a colleague of KG’s who told me that actually, he just has diarrhea practically every day of his life. I smirk to myself as Doug finishes his safety briefing.

The work was strenuous, but nothing I wasn’t used to. That particular expedition in Patagonia our packs weighed anywhere from seventy to ninety pounds laden with mountaineering equipment and extra food and fuel for cold weather camping. We carried them over treacherous, steep terrain in all kinds of weather. I had just graduated from high school and decided to take a year off. As a teenage boy, naturally I was convinced that I was invincible, and so had picked the hardest mountaineering course I could find. The NOLS catalog I was looking at also included trips to the Arctic Circle, Himalayan Mountaineering, and extended treks in the Amazon Rainforest. To this day when I meet NOLS alumni or instructors they are impressed that I did the Patagonia mountaineering course. To put it in perspective, of the roughly 15 people who have died on NOLS courses, the last 4 of them were in Patagonia.

We began hauling rocks into place on the trail that were so big that it took four people to move them. We had to use big metal bars to shift the rocks onto large pieces of webbing for group carrying. We worked hard to position and re-position the rocks and fit them like massive puzzle pieces into the trail. There was also the option of taking a sledge hammer to the rocks at various points. As Doug struggled to communicate what he wanted from the crew, another crew member who works in construction, clearly accustomed to taking and giving orders, stepped in to clarify some of the instructions with Doug. I thought back to KG trudging up to our group through deep snow, with his glacier goggles covering half his face. He seemed at home in the near zero temperatures of the snowfield, as if he had been born in an ice cave instead of in the sweltering equatorial heat.

In addition to the difficult loads we were all carrying; KG famously carried with him a big chunk of meat that he would cook a portion of each night. At lower altitudes, he would hang the meat from a tree so that pumas couldn’t get at it. That day he was teaching a class on how to set an anchoring point, or point of protection, in the snow to perform a technical ascent on glacier. He asked some of us to pull on the rope to demonstrate how strong it was. Then he invited more people to tug on it. Finally, with most of the group pulling on this climbing rope the anchor popped out of where it had been buried deep in the snow. It was the remainder of KG’s chunk of meat! I’ll never forget that class.

They have a saying in that region that “Patagonia without wind is like hell without the devil.” Eventually the wind got so bad that even after we built walls of snow around the tents they would crumble down and then we would wake up in the night with the walls of the tent hitting us in the face. By the third day, out of desperation, we began digging snow caves to sleep in. The temperature would fluctuate so wildly that it would rain at times and then quickly dip below freezing. On one of the coldest days KG gathered us together to have a little dance party to keep warm, with each of us taking turns in the center showing off our moves.

I looked up from the work at the majestic outline of Raineer. It looked so enticing from a distance, but I know all too well the icy hell that is waiting at the top for any young explorer looking to conquer it. We all nearly died on that glacier. My warmest layer, a down jacket, became useless when wet. I wasn’t expecting that conditions so cold would also rainy. We slept on the snow three to a cave with barely any food or water, taking shifts throughout the night shoveling the entrance clear of snow to avoid suffocating in our sleep. I would go to sleep shivering, have terrible nightmares, and wake up shivering all the more violently. I lost all feeling in my fingertips and toes and eventually lost the ability to move my toes altogether. The structures we built would not have lasted more than five days. On the fifth day, the weather broke. A part of me died on that glacier. As I sweat and struggled in the dirt to rearrange rocks that overcast Saturday afternoon, I remember the essence of suffering, and I smile.

“It almost seems as though a writer’s work, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to which suffering has penetrated his heart.” Proust, In Search Of Lost Time